I am a strong believer in the idea that no website would be successful without input from its visitors. After all, those are the website’s audience, and as such, have the biggest opinion on the sort of things that are posted because otherwise. Otherwise, why would they visit? If you’re running a blog or any website which invites users to comment, one app to definitely check out is Disqus.

A comments platform specifically designed for websites looking to unite their users’ comments, Disqus can be a great addition to any website. In this how-to, I’ll be showing you how to get Disqus up and running on your website so you can begin uniting your users through comments.

Our Disqus Pro Giveaway is now closed. Thanks everyone for entering and voting! We’re excited to announce that Beyn.org won a free year of Disqus Pro, with an overwhelming 52.8% of the votes, while Avinashtech.com won a free 6 months of Disqus Pro with 29.6% of the votes. Congratulations, and we hope these sites find Disqus Pro useful over the coming months!

Last week, we featured a review of Disqus Pro’s new features, and launched a giveaway with 2 free Disqus Pro accounts for our readers. Disqus Pro has many features that can enhance your site’s community spirit and increase your feedback on articles. We got a number of great entries for our giveaway, so we’re now back with the second part of our giveaway.

This time, we’ve included a list of all of the sites entered in the contest with a brief description of their site. Feel free to check them out, and then come back and vote for the site you’d like to see win our Disqus Pro giveaway. If you really like a site, share this article’s link and get your friends to vote to give them a better chance. The site with the most votes by midnight on Friday, December 16 CST will win a free year Disqus Pro subscription, while the one with the second most votes will win a free 6 month Disqus Pro subscription.

Looking through your site’s analytics can be insightful and unsettling at the same time. You can see how many people read your latest articles, but then wonder why they didn’t share the link or join in the conversation. Disqus has tried to take on this problem by making comments more social, and building in a new ranks system to let your loyal readers show that they’re staying involved.

We’re going to take a look at some of the newest features in Disqus, and how you can use them to enhance your site’s community. Then, we’ve got 2 Disqus Pro accounts to giveaway to our readers: a 1 year subscription, and a 6 month subscription. Keep reading to learn more about Disqus and how you can win Disqus Pro for your site!

Our giveaway is closed for new entries, but you can vote on the site you want to see with a Disqus Pro subscription on our 2nd round article!

Being the week before the Holidays hasn’t slowed things on the internet. Crowd favorite, Dropbox made it to 1.0, Blekko added one more feature to its arsenal of three, Disqus launched user centric dashboard, Facebook launched Instant Personalization with TripAdvisor & blocked all j.mp URLs, LinkedIn now has groups, Mint is going to teach financial management to kids, Yahoo to shut down its video service and Mark Zuckerberg found himself on the cover of TIME Magazine.

Read on for some of this week’s best web app news and updates you might’ve missed!